


(you cannot) silence ticking clocks

by grayintogreen



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst With A Bittersweet Ending, Gen, grief and loss and coping with it, lapis is kind of goth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-29 13:09:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20436572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayintogreen/pseuds/grayintogreen
Summary: "Those seconds, Peridot, mean everything. You can’t get them back, even if you wind the clock back. They’re precious." Garnet had told her all of this when she gave her the first watch, and Peridot had taken the lesson to heart just long enough to take it apart on a quest to prove her wrong. She’d failed.She was still failing.





	(you cannot) silence ticking clocks

**Author's Note:**

> what started as a flashfic about coping with grief turned into a stunning realization that Lapis would make one hell of a goth.

_Tick, tick…_

Peridot frowned at the watch in her hand, occasionally tracing the minute hand back with her powers where it would resume ticking as soon as she stopped, constantly moving forwards no matter how hard she tried to wind it back. 

Still, she tried.

Still, she failed.

She wasn’t used to failure- or rather, she was _used_ to it, but that wasn’t supposed to be a deterrent. If you fail at something, then you can pitch a fit about it, but after things are left broken and your emotions are cooled, you have to start again. 

This was her second watch. The first one she broke within an hour, and Garnet had given her this pocketwatch and chastised her against breaking it. There was a lesson here to be learned, and the lesson was simple, but she wasn’t ready to accept it.

_Tick, tick…_

“Still at it?” Lapis’s voice directly in her ear. She’d become so consumed by the rhythmic ticking and the obsession with making the watch stop moving without breaking it that she didn’t even hear her arrival. A strangled cry escaped her and she clutched the watch to her chest to either protect it or to hide it, even though the latter was a moot point. She’d already seen it.

“No, I mean, yes- I mean!” Peridot stammered, gripping the watch tighter. She swallowed hard as her voice caught in her throat. She’d done so well not crying about this, but her repeated failures had her on edge, and a few tears leaked out from underneath her visor. “I still don’t _understand_.”

Lapis shifted to her left side and held out her hand for the watch. Peridot was reluctant to hand it over, but eventually she relented and wrung her hands together so she could do something else with her fingers in lieu of having the ticking source of her distress to play with.

“You… Know how time works, right?” Lapis remarked, dryly, as the clock continued to tick. Peridot flushed an indigo color and reached over to snatch the watch back, but Lapis held it out of her reach.

“Of course I do! That’s not the point. The point is-” She drew in a sharp, frustrated breath and willed herself not to start bawling. She was losing it. She was going insane. The math didn’t add up and never would and a stupid watch wasn’t going to make it suddenly become clearer to her. She should be able to _do something_. She should be able to _solve this_.

Lapis was quiet, still holding the watch high over her head. Peridot could wrench it out of her grasp with her metal powers if she wanted, but the fact that she wasn’t meant that part of her wanted it taken out of her hands. “It’s not like it ever stops moving for us either, Peridot. We just don’t think about it until something forces us to.”

The smaller gem looked cowed for a second- time was a tomb for Lapis. There was a time when the passage of time was damning for her- twice over, even. All she had was the knowledge that time was passing and she was suffering and nothing was being done to prevent that. Time was what had broken her, in the end. Had she only been sealed within a mirror for a few years or less, then perhaps it wouldn’t have been so awful, but it wasn’t years, it was millenniums.

But even that was _so much time_, and she’d healed. Time had fixed that too. For a gem, time was only a problem until it wasn’t, and that was why she’d been given the watches. It was a gentle reminder that the clock kept ticking, and it was up to her to understand that for some that _meant_ something. 

_Those seconds, Peridot, mean everything. You can’t get them back, even if you wind the clock back. They’re precious._ Garnet had told her all of this when she gave her the first watch, and Peridot had taken the lesson to heart just long enough to take it apart on a quest to prove her wrong. She’d failed.

She was still failing.

Realizing Peridot had retreated into her own head, Lapis lowered her arm and offered the watch back, her usually neutral expression becoming deeply disheartened, as if Peridot’s despair was turning the air, itself, miserable.. “You’re taking this really hard, aren’t you?”

The tears came harder now and she snatched the watch back and curled herself around it. The ticking was muffled now, but it was loud enough to be a horrible damning sound. Back when she didn’t care, the idea that all organic life was doomed to die didn’t really bother her, but faced with that stark reality and a truth she already knew and a lesson she didn’t need to learn because she should know better, she was overwhelmed.

“I’m _smart_,” she whimpered. “I should have figured out how to fix this! This shouldn’t have happened! I…” She swallowed again, tears flowing freely down her cheeks now. “Why can’t I fix it, Lapis? This is what I do! This is the one thing I'm good at!”

The blue gem drew her knees up to her chin and stared out across the grassy field, dotted with its carved stones laid out in orderly rows. Such a strange custom, she had thought when she witnessed it for the first time. When gems died, their shards were harvested. They were used to make new gems. It was such a crass, horrible process and there was no mourning attached to it- not like what Peridot was doing when she wasn't self-flagellating about how creating life where there was none was her entire reason for being, and failing at that one thing made her worthless.

But in this cold contrast to what Homeworld was like and how Earth was, Lapis found the answer. Her fingers grazed across the grass and then probed deeper into the earth, wet from last night’s rain and easy to pull up. With Peridot still quietly sobbing beside her, she pulled up a handful of mud and grass with one single worm dangling pathetically out of the filthy mass, confused as to why its burrowing had been disrupted.

“Here, look at this.” 

Peridot looked up, her visor streaked and her expression miserable. She stared at the mudball for a moment and then looked back at Lapis. “It’s mud. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Yeah, it’s mud, but what else?” Lapis rolled her eyes. For someone so intelligent, Peridot could be obtuse, especially when she was already trying to be difficult. They both knew she understood the situation- her problem was that she was beating herself up for not having a solution or a preventative measure. To her, this was just unfair and wasteful. To her, this was an insult to her coding.

And she was right, but also wrong, because Lapis was starting to figure it out, and were she the type to gloat about these things, she’d pride herself in figuring it out before Peridot did.

“A worm… And grass,” Peridot drawled.

“So we know nothing grows in a kindergarten after its been used up, right? Life ends there- that’s what you said.”

“Where are you going with this?” She was hooked. Lapis had her attention now, and for all that she was usually the last person to have _anything_ figured out- much less be able to explain it- this was making more sense the longer she thought about it. It was so strangely _comforting_ to her in the weirdest way, and made so much sense that she was oddly happier for having figured it out.

“There’s _life_ in _this_ place,” Lapis said, leaning closer to Peridot, still holding the mudball. The worm wriggled as if to further prove the truth to her words. “This is where all life should end for them, but there’s still life all around. It never stops.”

_Tick, tick…_

It took a moment, but slowly Peridot’s eyes widened and she leapt to her feet, the watch still clutched in her hand, as she looked around. There were flowers here, yes. Well manicured bushes boasting sharp green leaves. There were even trees along the edges boasting late spring blossoms. Birds perched on the stones and sang sweet dirges and a family of rabbits hid in the shadows and hopped from stone to stone in a quest for some of the clovers. This place that had boasted nothing but death wasn’t gray and barren like a kindergarten, but thrumming with life.

She stared at the clock. Once more she used her powers to pull the minute hand back and once more it just kept ticking along. Time kept moving on. The world kept moving on. Something would still be here, long after people weren’t.

“I really couldn’t have done anything, could I?” She asked no one in particular, but since Lapis was here, she answered.

“You couldn’t have stopped _that_, but you can do something. You can make sure there’s always life somewhere, like you're good at. You're just gonna be good at it in a different way.” It was so optimistic that Lapis was just as surprised by her words as Peridot was- if her friend was stunned to the point of wondering where her dreary, laconic, rarely contemplative roommate was, then Lapis wanted to know the same thing.

And yet… It felt right, like finding some aspect of the world that didn’t actually terrify her offered her a strange comfort in a time of sorrow and needing to mend again. Maybe that would never comfort Peridot, who solved problems by not accepting them, but grim acceptance was Lapis’s entire thing, and for once that didn’t seem like such a bad thing.

Once again, Peridot stared down at the clock, its ticking persistent, but drowned out by the bird song now. “Organic life breaks down. It goes back to the earth. The cycle repeats. It never ends unless…” Well, unless gems come along and suck all the minerals from the earth and leave it barren and worthless, but that won’t happen again. Not on Earth. “It never ends.”

“Nope.” Lapis dropped the mudball back onto the ground. “It sucks that she’s gone. I miss her too. But she’s gonna be flowers or more grass. Or a tree.” She shrugged. “She’s still here.”

She half-wondered if that meant that Peridot would start attempting to communicate with every bush or blade of grass in the hopes of achieving some true victory over this grief, rather than just finally accept what she already knew, but the little green gem just walked forwards, straight to the stone bearing the name CONNIE UNIVERSE in bold lettering. Underneath, in smaller font was a date and the words “forever our knight” with a single carved rose at the bottom. Peridot read the words over and over, committed the idea that Connie was gone and that her organic body would return to the earth in a way that gem bodies never could. She would keep this planet healthy and strong. She would defend it even though she was gone.

_Tick, tick…_

The clock would tick on- the world would move on- but Connie and all the other humans of Beach City and the entire world would keep it going. New humans would come and she could maybe, _maybe_ learn to appreciate them, too.

With some trepidation, Peridot placed the watch on the top of the stone where it continued to tick, counting down seconds, then minutes, then hours on the planet Earth, where life never truly stopped, and there was comfort for the endless ones in that they may have to mourn, but they’ll always be able to see what new life begins where the old life ends.

And there was peace in that. Life and death and love and birth. Of course, when it came down to it, the good math in the whole thing would come back down to the first thing she really properly got about Earth.

“Thank you,” Peridot sighed, and maybe she was talking to no one or maybe she was talking to Connie and hoping she’d somehow hear her in some way, but since Lapis was here, she answered.

“I won’t tell Garnet you needed me to solve the problem for you.”

Despite herself, the smaller gem snorted and then reached for Lapis’s hand, entwining her fingers with the other gem’s muddy ones. “I would’ve gotten it, eventually.”

“Uh-huh.” Lapis rolled her eyes, good-naturedly. “Come on. Let’s go home.”

The two gems walked together, hand in hand, out of the quiet graveyard. Left alone on the stone surrounded by dozens like it in a place where dozens more would join it over the next decades and centuries that Peridot, Lapis, and the other Crystal Gems would see, the pocketwatch ticked on, unobserved.


End file.
